Nexus S and Motorola XOOM To Remain On Android 4.1; No AOSP Support For Nexus 4

Yesterday, Google released the Nexus 4 in quite a few countries of the world, pushed the Android 4.2 OTA update for the Galaxy Nexus and the Nexus 7, released the updated binaries and Android 4.2 factory images for all the devices, and lastly, pushed the latest version of Android to AOSP.

Google’s lead AOSP engineer – Jean Baptiste Quèru – also announced that beginning with Android 4.2 Jelly Bean, Google will be ending support for the Nexus S and the Motorola XOOM. This means that both these devices will not be getting any future updates from Google including the Android 4.2 Jelly Bean update. This should not really come as a surprise since both these devices have been in the market for nearly 2 years or more. Even then, both these devices are actually running a much more newer version of Android compared to majority of the Android devices out there.

The surprising news, however, is the lack of support for the Nexus 4 and the Nexus 7 3G variant in AOSP. It was initially presumed that the Nexus 4 lacks LTE so that it could be AOSP-compliant, but it looks like Google is yet to convince Qualcomm to open-source its secret sauce! Or, Google might be facing some issues with open-sourcing the GSM stacks used in the Nexus 4 or the Nexus 7 3G variant.

Hopefully, whatever the issue be, Google will be able to solve it and support the Nexus 4 in AOSP.